cmarshall

Which is why the confirmed Covid death count for the US is 618,000 while the true number, estimated from excess deaths, is greater than 900,000?

Yes, the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs is a deplorable human rights abuse. Its relevance to the handling of the Covid epidemic, however, is zero. But since you are so concerned with global human rights abuses, here's a quick quiz you will enjoy: What is the only country to kill up to a million innocent people since Pol Pot established that standard of atrocity in Cambodia in the mid 1970's? Hint: it wasn't China and it wasn't Russia.

Textbook case of use of statistics to induce innumeracy in the reader: BEIJING: China's COVID-19 cases hit a seven-month high on Tuesday (Aug 10), after a cluster at a test site drove up numbers as the Delta variant challenges Beijing's grip on the pandemic. The seven-month high on Tuesday was 144 cases in a country of 1.4 billion.

The FT article cited is singularly unimpressive. The writer makes the claim that Covid is slowing China's economic growth without ever showing how that would work. It's true that exports declined from June's spectacular 32% year over year growth to July's still very high 19% increase. That might turn into a slowdown in exports at some point, but it doesn't look like it yet. It also might be due to the fact that by summer of 2020 the Chinese economy was already rebounding at a strong clip from the epidemic. The article cites only one number for new Covid cases which was for Aug. 9, 2021 and amounted to 94 persons! It beggars belief that anyone could imagine that a new case rate of less than one hundred per day could have any impact at all on an economy of 1.54 billion people. Frankly, 94 new cases per day equals zero. The writer cites an increase in factory gate, i..e. wholesale, prices of 9% in July year over year. Inflation is usually an effect of too much economic activity, not too little. He doesn't explain how an increase in wholesale inflation, even if sustained, points to an economic slowdown. There is one quote in the article that does suggest a causal link between a slowdown in China's growth and a spread of Covid, but not in China: Ken Cheung, chief Asian foreign exchange strategist at Japanese bank Mizuho, said the global spread of the Delta variant “might have dented global demand”, which would stand to affect Chinese exports. This article does not survive a critical reading, in my opinion.

I measure the benevolence and warm feelings of the Beijing regime in the number of lives they have saved. The US has a confirmed Covid death count of 618,000 with the real number greater than 900,000. China's confirmed count is 4,848. Probably their true count is also higher, but not the 4 million that it would have been if the Beijing government had performed as with as much criminal indifference as the US government. Australia, unruly youth or not, has a confirmed Covid death count of 943 or 3.72 per hundred thousand. The Chinese have had the greatest success in the world in controlling the epidemic despite that it is a poor country with per capita GDP of $9,917, far less than the OECD countries. This is a truly impressive achievement. If you want to console yourself that the China also has committed human rights abuses, then feel free to do so even if it is entirely irrelevant.

Nucleic acid testing in China costs between $0.88 and $1.88 per person. That's still expensive for the mass testing that the Chinese are performing, but a lot cheaper than shutting the economy down, Wuhan-style. The US has now achieved vaccination of 70% of the adult population and is now facing 100,000 new cases per day. The US economy is also growing well, although that rate is slowing somewhat and in those red states with the anti-vax populations the economic hit is still greater. The point is that with a competent government they use whatever method is necessary to shutdown the epidemic and they continue to succeed. The Chinese will drop the mass testing only if it becomes clear that vaccination is stopping the virus. That's the right approach. If Biden had announce a 77-day lockdown on Jan. 20 with compensation for the losers, the Covid epidemic would be in the rear view mirror now. Biden probably knows that, but is afraid the voters would never forgive him.

Reasoning from stereotypes is superficial and just silly and just reinforces your own prejudices. Non-authoritarian Australia and New Zealand are continuing to pursue the same zero case strategy as China with success. It's more likely to be explained by the competence of the governments in question. Is it so hard to contemplate that, at least in this case, the Chinese government are vastly more competent and more committed to saving the lives of their citizens than the US, UK, Brazil, etc.?

Thailand lost the plot. They relaxed public health standards when they should have re-imposed them and they let the high-so crowd get away with their nightclubs, etc. in addition to failing to secure vaccine supplies. What is important is controlling the pandemic. If vaccines do that, then fine. Use vaccines. If vaccines aren't available or too much of the population refuses to get the shot, then the Chinese model of widespread testing can control the epidemic perfectly well as we see, without shutting down the economy. The trouble with the Western countries is that they want the epidemic to be controlled for them, without taking any responsibility for their own safety and that of others.

Whenever a real estate agent has asked me to sign a lease with the assurance that it is just a "standard" lease, I reply, "Whose standard? That's not my standard." If you think that contractual standards are determined by stationery products then be my guest to a lifetime of acquiesence.

Herd immunity may no longer be possible in any case. In Michigan 50% of the wild deer now test positive for Covid. Since we aren't going to be vaccinating the deer nor the squirrels, bats, possum, raccoons, etc. a permanent animal reservoir outside of China now appears to have been established. If so, then herd immunity will never be achieved.

A month or two ago there was some discussion here about how China was going to fare against Covid-19 going forward. Leaving aside the out-and-out China haters for whom all data from China is a lie, there was the group that was sure that the Delta variant would overwhelm China as it had some other countries. My stated view at the time was that the Delta variant would only overwhelm countries that gave up trying to control it which at the time included the UK, the US (although changing under the new administration), and Brazil. While the transmissibility of the Delta variation is apparently higher than the original wild version, the transmission vector itself, aerosols, hadn't changed and could be controlled effectively using the standard public health measures of testing, isolating positives, and contact tracing along with masks and social distancing. While some countries like Thailand would fail to apply the public health measures with the same rigor as in the first instance, China would not fail to do so. Therefore, I expected China to continue to control its epidemic effectively. So, how did China do? The short answer is: best in class. New case count for China on August 5, 2021 was 533, all from Delta. At the same time the US, with one fourth the population, is experiencing 100,000 new cases per day. Because Delta transmits so quickly the authorities now trace not only those who have contacted infected persons, but also the contacts those people have themselves had. Vietnam has been doing two-level contact tracing since the beginning. But in some cases the spread has been so fast that it exceeds the capacity of their contact tracing system. When the UK and Sweden reached that point last year, they just gave up on contact tracing altogether. The Chinese response to the failure of contact tracing has been mass testing on a gargantuan scale that no other country has matched. When Delta spread too quickly in Guangdong Province, for example, the cities of Nanjing, Zhangjiajie, Zhengzhou, Wuhan and Yangzhou all have carried out citywide testing. Nanjing, for example, had 200 cases and then tested all 9.3 million residents within two weeks. By doing mass testing on this scale the Chinese government was able to avoid lockdowns and the economic hit that would have resulted. China also began its vaccination program in December. As of Aug. 3 they have administered 1.7 billion doses. So, as I predicted, there is no risk that Covid will get out of hand or overwhelm health care facilities in China.

To the OP: Never sign a lease unless you have negotiated out the most objectional clauses. If, as sometimes happens in Thailand, the landlord refuses to negotiate, then move on to another unit. Particularly in the current new tenant drought, you have all the leverage. You start to negotiate by making a list of the risks you face in entering into a rental and then write fixes. For example, the lease should clearly state how long after you surrender the apartment at the end of your lease the landlord has to refund your security deposit, e.g. "within seven (7) days." After you have identified the risks you face and proposed solutions, then you go over the landlord's proposed lease and rewrite the clauses that protect the landlord by unreasonably pushing a burden onto you. I have never signed a lease without making changes first. There is no such thing as a "standard" lease. There are only gullible renters and those who know what they are doing.

Today I got my second Sinopharm shot at the TOT Headquarters. It was altogether different from the first shot a month ago in an empty hall. Today there were hundreds of people and we Sinopharm recipients were in a different building from the Sinovac recipients, of whom there were also hundreds at least. The whole procedure was very well organized: seated outside in groups of a hundred or so, after ten minutes my group was ushered in and seated. Waited another ten minutes then sent to the document verification stations who checked my passport and appointment slip. From there on to the next large room standing on line. With five minutes sent to a two nurse station who checked my papers, asked if I had had any side effects from the first shot, and then injected me. Then ushered to a waiting area with about 50 recipients. We were timed to the minute and released after 15 minutes. Then they stamped our documentation on the way out, in Thai, of course. So, the organization and efficiency was impressive. However, one sign posted detailed that the number of us over-70s who got Sinopharm under this program was only about 1,000. I only saw two or three foreigners today.